Hello, the very talented Oskar Stalberg (Bad North, Townscaper) posted this a few days ago.
You can see the animated version of this image here.
As Oskar explains it, the benefit of this approach is:
“I just realized that if I (hypothetically) would make another game on small procgen dioramas, I could just bake a megatexture for each scene. I could paint it full of decals without any runtime costs. I could make textures follow the terrain like tiling and blending never could… Especially on weaker platforms, heavy decaling is hard on the overdraw. This should eliminate that problem. You could paint the whole scene with nice contextual decals… With his kind of approach you can align decal features to the terrain. Here, I’m drawing strokes either along or across the slope. This kinda thing would be really hard to achieve with a standard tiling textures approach.”
To achieve it, he says:
“I’m drawing the whole mesh to the texture for each decal, using the vertex positions to sample the decal space, and the UV positions as final clip space positions.”
Does anyone have suggestions for how to accomplish this?
I found success procedurally decal’ing a whole level with this free package. And then baking it into a texture via Ronja’s method here. But I wonder if others have better ideas for how to achieve more with this approach.
